metaLABprojects

The metaLABprojects series is a product of HUP’s partnership with metaLAB, a research and teaching unit at Harvard University dedicated to exploring and expanding the frontiers of networked culture in the arts and humanities. Institutionally housed within the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, its projects span the globe.

metaLAB is founded on the belief that many of the key research challenges and opportunities of our era—fundamental questions regarding experience in a connected world, democracy and social justice, the boundaries between nature and culture—transcend divisions between the arts, humanities and sciences; between the academy, industry, and the public sphere; between theoretical and applied knowledge. The metaLABprojects series has two intellectual ambitions:

—­To translate the leading examples of contemporary digital/multimedia scholarship and experimentation into lively and engaging print volumes, volumes that remix and repackage digital originals in print-specific ways; and

—­To serve as a platform for the definition and theorization of emerging currents of work in digital humanities/digital culture by leading scholar/practitioners.

The word “project” is being employed here in two complementary manners: to designate the documentation of existing high-impact research projects and in the sense of projecting outward and beyond. Whether a “remix” or an agenda-setting “projection” or a combination of both, each volume in the series will assume the form of an extended essay that deepens and documents a given domain of practice and experimentation.

Below is a list of in-print works in this collection, presented in series order or publication order as applicable.

Jeffrey Schnapp and Matthew Battles reflect on what libraries have been in order to speculate about what they will become: hybrid places that intermingle books and ebooks, analog and digital formats, paper and pixels. They combine the cultural history of libraries with innovations at metaLAB, a research group at the forefront of digital humanities.

More than a physical space, a hypercity is a real city overlaid with information networks that document the past, catalyze the present, and project future possibilities. Hypercities are always under construction. HyperCities puts digital humanities theory into practice to chart the proliferating cultural records of places around the world.

Fusing digital humanities with media studies and graphic design history, Graphesis offers a critical language for analysis of graphical knowledge and argues for studying visuality from a humanistic perspective, exploring how graphic languages can serve fields where qualitative judgments take priority over quantitative statements of fact.

With the rise of drones and computer-controlled weapons, the line between war and video games has blurred. The Military-Entertainment Complex traces how the realities of war are inflected by their representation in entertainment. War games, in turn, feature an increasing number of weapons, tactics, and scenarios from the War on Terror.

The Giza Plateau represents perhaps the most famous archaeological site in the world. With the advent of new technologies, the Necropolis is now accessible in four dimensions. Peter Der Manuelian explores technologies for cataloging and visualizing Giza and offers more general philosophical reflection on the nature of visualization in archaeology.

Tara McPherson asks what might it mean to design—from conception—digital tools and applications that emerge from contextual concerns of cultural theory and from a feminist concern for difference. This question leads to the Vectors lab, which for a dozen years has experimented with digital scholarship at the intersection of theory and praxis.

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Now Available: The digital Loeb Classical Library (loebclassics.com) extends the founding mission of James Loeb with an interconnected, fully searchable, perpetually growing virtual library of all that is important in Greek and Latin literature.

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